Four Ways to Help Newcomers Feel Like They Belong

The useful part

One day, she was offered an internship in the Bay Area and decided to make the leap, despite not knowing anything about it or anyone there. "I said goodbye to everything I knew and loved in Philadelphia and came to the Bay. "They took me in and welcomed me and brought me into their whole social world, which showed me so much love." This isn't the experience for most people.

How it works

• If you went down the street and you talked to somebody, if you made eye contact.
• you had to smile at them or you said good morning or good afternoon." Then she moved to Boston for graduate school.
• I knew nobody here." And where she got smiles and small talk in Puerto Rico, in Boston she "got glares." "And I'm like, oh, OK.
• You don't do any of that here." It was painful and created a large void in her life.
• As Darilys talked to other Latinos in Boston, she assumed "I'm the only one who feels this way, but I wasn't.

What to take from it

So if I am dead in a ditch, like nobody will figure it out for a long time." This could have been a story of loneliness and disconnection, but it wasn't, because someone took her under their wings—actually two strangers, her roommates Lauren and Deirdre. There was like a whole group of people that felt like that." Their stories are different, but they reveal the same truth. It interrupts the invisible web of relationships that makes everyday life feel familiar, that makes us feel like we belong.

Example or evidence

• At the US Chamber of Connection, our recent study on social connection in America ex...

Details worth keeping

Liz Cahill was born and raised in Philadelphia. Not knowing a soul." When she arrived, it hit her. "I was like, wow, I'm in a place that like, literally nobody knows me.